Saturday, July 13, 2013

Putz's whips up delights for 75 years

We’re exploring how certain places have shaped our community personality, what we might learn from them and what some neighborhoods need to be healthy for next generations.

Let us know what places you have passion for, your concerns and hopes for those places. If you are getting things done in your community, we’d like to hear about that, too. Email Carolyn Washburn, editor and vice president.

The celebration

Putz’s celebrates its 75th anniversary 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday. Specials, commemorative giveaways and special prices will be offered. Putz’s is in Northside at 2673 Putz Place. Information: www.putzscreamywhip.com or 513-681-8668.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

Capable of moving an expressway with one handwritten letter.

Keeping customers coming back for 75 years.

Sitting on a street named in its honor.

Putz’s Creamy Whip has earned its 3-L status: a legendary, local landmark.

Yet, the descendents of founders Constantine and Anna Putz still put in 12-hour days and seven-day weeks.

“We open at 10 a.m. But I’m in at 5:30 a.m.,” said Jack Borgman, co-owner and husband of Donna Borgman, the founders’ great-granddaughter. “If someone is good enough to come by for a cone at 8 a.m. when I start making ice cream, then, by God, I’m good enough to wait on them.”

Some may wonder, what’s wrong with these people? Their status is secure. Folks come from miles around to their little seasonal stand nestled in a Northside valley at the foot of Mount Airy Forest.

The Borgmans could take it easy and turn over the business to members of the fifth and sixth generations of the family. They’re making cones with that special little curl on top as their relatives have done for, come Sunday’s diamond jubilee celebration, 75 years.

Donna Borgman listened politely to the “take it easy” argument. Her family ties, from the Putzs to the Ehrhardts to the Borgmans, “are pure German,” as her son Ray Borgman likes to say, and “always polite.”

She sat under the shade of ginkgo, maple and walnut trees whose branches act as a canopy next to her family’s soft-serve emporium.

She can’t leave the family business. Her dad, Ray “Babe” Ehrhardt, only lasted one day in retirement before telling his wife, Lillian, “to hell with this, I’m going back to work.” And he did. He worked until he died on Christmas Eve 2011.

That kind of dedication sticks with Donna. “I’m Daddy’s little girl,” she said. To her, to her husband, to her son, working at Putz’s is not a job.

“This is our way of life,” she said.

Family matters at Putz’s. Attending to family business starts the day.

Every morning, when Donna comes into the back door, she heads for the front serving room dominated by two gigantic soft-serve ice-cream makers. One is brand new. One is ancient, in service since 1954, and nicknamed, Betsy. Regulars know to ask for their creamy whip “from the old machine.”

Old Betsy’s ice cream “is creamier,” Donna said. “There’s less air in the mix. The new machine is cranked all the way down. But it still puts more air in the ice cream than the old machine.”

The two ice cream makers take up so much space the tight confines would make a ship’s galley seem roomy. Donna maneuvers around them and comes face to face with photos of her Grandma Gertie Ehrhardt, who died in 2003, and her dad. Both are at work inside Putz’s. Both smile at her from across the years.

The photos hang above the main serving window that faces the parking lot and is adjacent to a rack of cones waiting to be filled with ice cream.

“I say hello to my grandma and my dad every morning,” Donna said.

Those morning greetings stand as a promise that Donna and her family – “The kids who work for us are family, too” – will uphold the Putz’s tradition of “hard work, good food and great service.”

Cincinnati Police Officer Terry Hill has been a Putz’s regular for 20 years. As a student of human behavior, he knows why the place has so many return customers.

“They have an old-fashioned touch down here,” Hill said after ordering a barbecue sandwich. “They talk with you. They smile at you. They make you feel welcome.”

An hour before, the place welcomed 1,200 pounds of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. Putz’s goes through 3,840 pounds of that sweet stuff every summer.

Some of that syrup made its way onto Ervin Wuest’s banana split. The Delhi Township man has been coming to Putz’s since it opened in 1938 in two old attached streetcars, down the street from Spring Grove Cemetery, at the present-day site of an empty used-car lot.

Wuest followed Putz’s when it moved, first to Price Hill and then to its present location.

He keeps coming back, he said, simply and with a wink, “because it’s better than the rest.”

Hershey’s syrup went into Tom Sperber’s chocolate soda. After finishing his hot mett cheese coney, the certified financial planner dug into his soda. “I’ve had 1,000 of these combinations over the years,” said the Blue Ash resident.

As a Putz’s regular, he’s continuing a family tradition. His dad went there when he was kid growing up in Westwood. Sperber went to Putz’s as a kid living in Pleasant Ridge. Now, his four little girls are frequent fliers. “We have a code,” he noted. “If I say, ‘We’re going to drive on 74,’ the girls all perk up. They know we’re going here.”

When his family pays a visit, Dad gets to tell the tale of how Putz’s nearly went kaput. In 1971, plans called for Interstate 74 to run right next to the creamy whip’s back door. That would have killed the family business.

Donna’s mom wrote a letter to President Richard Nixon. She noted how Putz’s supported two families and was a Cincinnati tradition. Nixon passed the letter along to the secretary of transportation.

“About a month later, three limos pulled into the parking lot,” Jack Borgman recalled. “Guys in suits got out. One went over to the foreman of the crew working on the expressway and told him the highway was going to be moved. Then he came to the window and asked Lillian: ‘Who in the hell do you know that could get the federal government to move the interstate?’ ”

Lillian took that as a sign. She changed her menu.

“We started serving lunch items like hot dogs,” said her daughter, Donna Borgman. “We fed the workers who were building the expressway.”

Thanks to her mom, plus the power of her pen and the family’s soft-serve ice cream, those workers built that interstate just far enough away for Putz’s to turn 75. ⬛